12-09-28 Dispatch de Girona: The Monrachy, the Catholic Church, and the Catalan quest for independence

King Juan Carlos is willingly subjecting himself to humiliation, while he could go on safari instead.  As was the case in 1981, he may be key to containing the military under crisis related to the Catalan quest for independence.  One can only hope that under Benedict XVI the Catholic Church will not fail the test.

Girona,  September 28 – the train from Barcelona to Girona is timely and comfortable.   On the way, we pass small towns and villages.  Invariably, houses that face the tracks are decorated with Catalan flags.

The daily newspapers indicate that yesterday, King Juan Carlos was still in Barcelona, most of it spent with President/”President” Artur Mas, but a single amicable joint photographs of the two is yet to emerge.

Their day started in the Catalan parliament, where the final vote on the November referendum was 84 in favor, 21 opposed, and 26 abstained.  From there the King and the President/”President” went to the Barcelona harbor, for the inauguration of a new port.  En route, the two were photographed, seated side by side in the front of the large transit vehicle.  Artur Mas was smiling ear to ear, the King, sulky, was looking out of the window.

At the Barcelona port, an attempt was made to produce an official group photo, which ended up in embarrassment, reported as a breach of protocol.  The end product is a photo, where the representative of China (which sponsored the new Barcelona port) in the center, the President/”President” on the far right, and the King on the far left, both of them trying to resolve the embarrassment.

 

There is no doubt that the King is subjecting himself to unnecessary humiliation.  He could have just as well stayed in Madrid, or gone on another safari in Africa.

One should not underestimate King Juan Carlos, regardless of some unfortunate recent remarks regarding the Catalan quest for independence.  After all, his brave stand was key to defeating the fascist military coup of 1981.

The Catholic Church in Spain appears much closer to the military than to the civilian government, historically and also today, as evidenced by the bizarre sitting arrangement last Sunday, during the mass for La Merce’, where Artur Mas was besieged by senior members of the fascist Associacion Militar.  On the other hand, the King and the Catholic Church in Barcelona appear on amicable terms, as seen most recently earlier this week, on the occasion of the commemorative ceremony of one of the old monasteries in Barcelona.

As one gets closer to Girona, the landscape increasingly resembles the countryside of Provence or Toscana. Rolling hills that are carpeted with small fields of various crops, as opposed to the never ending corn fields of the American Midwest.  In Catalonia, in contrast with Provence and Toscana, the landscape is also sprinkled with industrial facilities. (according to newspapers, the Catalan economy is greater than that of Austria!)

Girona itself is located on a fork of the Rio Ter, in what used to be a major port, with a strategically positioned hill above it, which were all protected by strong walls since Roman times, some still standing. Rio Ter itself is comparable in size to the Amsterdam canals, and the buildings on its banks also resemble the old mercantile houses in Amsterdam.
 
Rio Ter, Girona, and canal in Amsterdam     

The narrow historic streets and alleys in Girona are decorated with Catalan flags.

Placa de Independencia, a major public space,  is a modest copy of the Placa Reial in Barcelona. Here too, there is a temporary stage built, with a large screen, and a band is preparing for tonight’s public concert and screening, part of the Girona film festival.

Girona was a center of Convivencia in the Middle Ages.  That era was eroded over centuries, but came to its bitter end with the institution of the Spanish Inquisition under Queen Isabella Catolica.

In Spain and other Catholic nations,  the Dominican Order played a key role in the Inquisition.  Therefore, the fate of the Dominican monateries can be viewed as an indicator of the fight of the People against oppression.

As is the case in numerous other medieval cities in Italy, France, and Spain, the Dominican compound in Girona is large, fortified, and matches or exceeds the cathedral in its position at the top of the hill.  It dates back to the 12th Century.

The main building remaining today is the large chapel.  It is denuded of any religious insignia, no cross, no stained glass windows.  It is locked up, and a small sign in the front identifies it as a “Hall” of the adjacent 400 year old University of Girona.

The convent part of the compound is falling apart, and is in the midst of a costly conservation project.  In contrast with other conservation projects in Girona, it is funded by the Spanish government, not the Catalan, says a large sign.  The coat of arms of the Spanish government on the sign in defaced by graffiti.

A few years back, I was visiting Toledo for a conference.  The large, fortified Dominican compound there is in pristine conditions.  The opening session of the conference, including a welcome speech by the Spanish Minster of Health, was conducted in a functional chapel in the compound, which appeared as an exotic, but bizarre choice of the organizers.

Museo della Tortura, near the ruined Dominican monastery in San Gimignano, Toscana

San Gimignano, Toscana, is another medieval walled city, almost entirely intact. At one time it was the hometown of the Dominican priest Savonarola, later the religious fanatic tyrant of Firenze, where with help from youth gangs he enforced "bonfires of the vanities", including musical instruments, theatrical devices, immodest clothing...  The Dominican Monastery in San Gimignano is in ruins, unmarked.  Right next to it is Museo della Tortura…

In one of the villages above Nice, Provence, not sure if it was Saint-Maurice, Saint-Sylvestre, or one of the other picturesque nearby villages, I found some years ago an unexpected large green commons in the middle of the village.  A small sign in one corner said: Here stood the Dominican monastery, raised to the ground by Napoleon in 1803.

The current Pope, Benedict XV I, as Cardinal Ratzinger, headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the historic office of the Inquisition.

One must wonder if conduct of the Catholic church, in case Spain enters a military-civil crisis, related to the Catalan quest for independence, would have been different had John Paul II still been at the helm.  Under John Paul II, with gracious help from then US Ambassador to the Vatican Lindy Boggs, I gained access for research to 500 years old archives of the Catholic Church in Toscana, which had never been opened to the public before.

12-09-27 Human Error or Mal Intent in the electronic record systems of the US courts (PACER and CM/ECF)

The same logic holds for the electronic record systems of the courts of the State of Israel. jz
 
______
Via online discussion group

A. Joseph Zernik, Human Rights Alert (NGO) wrote:

Dear Mr W:

• What you call "irregularities" was accepted, following rigorous peer-review by Data Analytics experts as conduct related to Mal Intent, or fraud.  It appeared to me that at least one of the five reviewers on my paper on PACER and CM/ECF was an American.  After all the other technical comments of the reviewers were squared away, he posed the following comment for me to answer:  It is truly Mal Intent, or simply Human Error?  As a legal scholar, surely you know that it is the question that is often most difficult to answer.  And the cover letter by the administrator of the review said that I must address all comments of the reviewers (kinda not the typical language in academic peer review, which is trying not to be an adversarial process). Therefore, I added a special sub-section to the paper, to address the issue.  It was accepted. [1,2] This comment is not related to your issue with the filing fee, but to the more serious false and deliberately misleading features of the systems.

• What happened to you has been described by others (not here) in the past.  It is the smallest part of the problem.

• Since you are filing electronically (first experience?), I would be grateful if you share couple of the NEFs (Notices of Electronic Filing) on a) Your complaint, b) Your summonses, c) the first minutes/order in the case.   No need for the records themselves, only the NEFs.  The NEFs are received by your secretary by email.  So it is as simple as forwarding the email notes to this group.

Obviously,  you should ask your secretary to show the NEFs to you first. You would realize that there is no "private" information there.  Once you see the NEFs, you may start wondering, why the US courts from Coast to Coast insist on hiding them from the public and from pro se litigants in their own cases, when the NEFs are public records by law.

Your help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

JZ

LINKS:
[1] 12-09-04 J. Zernik, "Design and Operation of the Electronic Record Systems of the US Courts are Linked to Failing Banking Regulation", Data Analytics 1:83-93 (2012) http://www.scribd.com/doc/104880125/ 

http://thinkmind.org/index.php?view=article&articleid=data_analytics_2012_3_50_60059 

[2] Zernik, J, “Large-scale fraud in US court records is linked to failing banking regulation” _ OpEdNews http://www.opednews.com/articles/Large-scale-fraud-in-US-co-by-Joseph-Zernik-120925-643.html

B. W wrote:

Speaking of corrupt electronic case management systems, as you always do Jose, and seldom understanding the practical import of your speaking of the irregularity of such systems,I am becoming a little more of a believer. 

I filed a federal action on August 21, but my secretary goofed thinking that the court would ask for the filing fee, so she didn't pay it electronically until asked.  They didn't ask, they just unfiled or deleted the case and gave notice why it was deleted, for failure to pay the filing fee.  We paid and it was "refiled" with a new filing date of August 28.  Well, of course, the filing fee is not really a filing fee at all, but a litigation fee to be earned by the court over the length of the litigation and as a filing fee it is an advance payment requirement that blocks access to the courts without hearing. So we filed an exparte motion to set aside the "unfiling" and reset to the original filing date, and for attorney fees and to declare the "unfiling" system unconstitutional.  The judge denied it because not supported by an affidavit.  I supplied an affidavit laying out the criminal aspects of violating the First, fifth and thirteenth amendments and saying that no affidavit was necessary because the facts were all a matter of record and this was not an exparte motion in any ordinary sense involving any usual aspect of litigation but that I was simply performing my duty to let a judge know about felonies being committed by his administrators in his name.  The clerk blocked or delayed it twice , more, then the judge ordered it for hearing next week, October 2.

Our constitutional contention is that neither the court nor its administration can obstruct filing, or "unfile" a case filed, as a matter of the right to petition, nor in any event, without a pre-unfiling hearing because filing and unfiling involve important rights, like the running or tolling of statutes of limitations and state claims statutes.  The thirteenth amendment issue is that the court treats the people like slaves where the "unfiling" is like punishing a person by twenty lashes for a non criminal offense against the whims of the master.  A "due process" warning is not sufficient because the "master" has no right to punish by whipping for violation of whims at all and the First Amendment requires strict scrutiny as to whether the court can interfere with filing at all, let alone as a means of collecting fees which are not even yet earned and the normal interest of which is a mere seven cents a day on money not yet earned.  It is noted, by the way, that general tax support for the courts is provided by Article I, Sec. 8, as an enumerated power and Article III grants no taxing or filing fee power to the courts at all.

I've asked you over and over to provide a practical effect of the looseness of the electronic case management system, noting generally that the adversarial nature of the system prevents arbitrary action by clerks or judges.  But now I'm not so sure.  In this case, if they had called it "unfiling", they would know immediately that they can't do that.  But they simply say they will "delete" it if the filing fee is not paid within 48 hours.  Soooo, I now too have to wonder just how far this absence of electronic certification can go.  The filing number which is issued chronologically, is the same, except that for a "temporary" filing in advance of payment, the case number carries a letter indication that it is only temporarily filed which is changed to a permanent "cv" when paid.  So, theoretically, the new number is in the order of numbers issued on August 21, albeit, a filing date of August 28.  They didn't really "delete" it either, but simply "unpublished" it so that the public aspect of filing is taken away...that is, it was published, then unpublished, something like unringing a previously rung bell.

The judge hearing the case is a senior black judge kind of in the mold of conservative Justice Clarence Thomas; not generally my favorite kind of judge.  However, I have noticed that even Justice Thomas can get civil rights conscious and philosophical, as he did in McDonald v Chicago.

The underlying case also involves the eighth and thirteenth amendment: A man jailed on a petty offense is refused medical attention as a means of punishing him and kept in jail longer than ordered and that caused a medical condition requiring amputation of his right leg.  It gets worse from there. But what I'm developing is a concept out of the peonage cases which views government treating people with the contempt of masters toward peons and slaves and causeing thereby systematic involuntary servitudes without a relevant conviction of crime.

W

12-09-27 Dispatch de Barcelona: San Miguel or Girona?

 
San Miguel or Girona?

There was not enough time to recover from the fiesta of La Merce', and Barcelona city workers have started this evening building big tents in the main squares for tomorrow's fiesta of San Miguel.  San Miguel is a local patron saint, and also the name of the biggest local brewry.

Consequently, I have no doubt that it is going to be a saintly fiesta...

I can't make up my mind whether to stay tomorrow in Barcelona for the fiesta, or take the train (in Spain there is a state of the art intercity train service) to Girona (Barcelona-Girona, about 1 hour trip, cost - under 8 Euros).

Girona was one of the medieval centers of Convivencia.  An old friend of mine, from a previous reincarnation, was a professor of medieval Spanish and French.  He told me of Girona, when he was invited there by the Spanish government in the mid-1990s, for some cultural event, celebrating the completion of the restoration of a part of the old city.

Before that, he had also won an official distinction by the Spanish government for his studies of the lineage of the translations of the Hebrew bible into the vernacular Spanish. He showed that the earliest such translations were based on tranlations, produced by rabbis for the benefit of women, who often could not read the Hebrew.

In his youth he was said to have been a playboy, but by the time I knew him he was old and frail.  Never returned my emails over the last few years.

Translation of the scripture into the vernacular was a major "Freedom of Information" issue in the medieval period:

• John Wycliff  (c. 1320 – 1384), often credited with the first translation of the Bible into English, was burnt at the stake.
• Pico della Mirandolla (1463-1494), true to type, limited himself to translating the Song of Solomon (according to Gershom Scholem Pico was heavily assisted by Rabbi Eliyahu del Medigo), and ended up imprisoned by the Pope.  Pico is said to have confessed on his death bed to Savonarola, and is today held as a church reformer.
• Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) translated the bible into German, in one of the key revolutionary acts of the reformation.

Cross-cultural, Arabic/Greek/Hebrew/Latin translations were a key product of the medieval Spanish Convivencia, and were later heavily relied upon during the Italian   Renaissance.

As was the case during the European Middle Ages, the preservation of knowlege, and public access to it, will likely also emerge as a key issue in the Medieval-Digital Period.

12-09-27 Hello World!

Recent:

Thursday, September 27 @ 21:03 : Barcelona, ES

Thursday, September 27 @ 20:40 : Faversham, GB

Thursday, September 27 @ 19:07 : Oshawa, CA

Thursday, September 27 @ 18:54 : Draveil, FR

Thursday, September 27 @ 18:40 : Los Angeles, California, US

Thursday, September 27 @ 16:53 : Autruy-sur-juine, FR

Thursday, September 27 @ 16:53 : Draveil, FR

Thursday, September 27 @ 16:43 : Chicago, Illinois, US

Thursday, September 27 @ 13:46 : Tunisia, TN

Thursday, September 27 @ 00:29 : Colombes, FR

Thursday, September 27 @ 00:29 : Purcellville, Virginia, US

12-09-27 CCC - the German Choas Computer Club

Another interesting interaction in Data Analytics 2012 was with a German guy, who introduced himself as a member of the CCC (Chaos Computer Club), a notable German hackers group.  Apparently, at some point the German government tried to classify them as a "terrorist organization".

• CCC outed the German government for engineering a specific Trojan for spying on targeted individuals with no legal foundation.
• CCC launched a satellite to overcome internet censorship.

You can find more on their activities through a web search.

I challenged him on day 1 that the German courts had likely engineered information systems in the courts, similar to those that I presented in the US and Israel.  

Initially, he was in disbelief, saying that the German bureaucracy would not go that low.

I suggested to him some simple tests. For his benefit I also created a "preliminary report". [1]

A couple of days later, he came sheepishly and asked what could be done about it...  

LINKS:

[1] 12 09 26 Preliminary review of the German Federal Constitutional Court electronic records

http://www.scribd.com/doc/107097024/

12-09-27 The Europeans appear clueless about what is going on in the United States

The presentations in Data Analytics 2012 and NextTech 2012 were illuminating.

After my first presentation, following questions from the audience, I realized that they were clueless about what is going on in the United States.  It was particularly surprising, since the audience was practically all academics from Europe and Asia, with only a few from the United States.

Therefore, in the following presentations I started by explaining that:

• According to US government statistics, 50% of Americans are now around or below poverty - they are still under the impression of solid home owning middle class in the United States, and
• A series of quotes by legal experts, regarding corruption of the state and federal courts in the United States - they are still under the impression of the US as a model "democracy".
• Explaining that I am only limiting my talk to the role of corrupt case management systems of the courts in these dramatic changes of the past couple of decades.

One notable exception was an American, who came to me and represented himself as a "Senior Director" from the Washington DC FTI Consulting firm: [1]

FTI CONSULTING

is a global business advisory firm that provides multidisciplinary solutions to complex challenges and opportunities. With the full power of unique depth of thought combined with the global expertise of leading professionals, we are committed to protecting and enhancing the enterprise value of our clients.

He seemed to be familiar with my writing regarding Countrywide and Bank of America, which were not the topics of my presentations... 

[1] FTI CONSULTING

http://www.fticonsulting.com/

12-09-27 Dispatch de Barcelona: Catalan parliament approves referendum on independence, Athens on fire, protests in Madrid, Lisbon

Artur Mas speaking in Parliament, September 26, prior to a vote approving the November 25 referendum on independence.

Barcelona, September 27 - the Catalans continue their peaceful quest for independence.  Following debate, the Catalan parliament passes yesterday a law mandating the referendum on Catalan independence, proposed the previous day by President Artur Mas. Pictures from parliament's debate are on the front pages of the local paper, but not the online editions.

Police besieged during violent demonstrations in Madrid, September 25. 

In Madrid, protesters called for a new round of demonstrations Wednesday after a day of clashes with riot police on the streets of Madrid. The latest toll from the violence is 35 people arrested and 64 wounded.

 

Athens, September 26, violent demonstrations.

Athens was again on fire yesterday, demonstrators against the austerity measures, imposed as part of the financial pact with the banks, used molotov cocktails against the police.

Demonstrations continued yesterday in Portugal as well.

In the meanwhile, Germany and France are pushing for a "more perfect union" of the military and banks of Europe - a sure recipe for pimped prostitution of the People of Europe.

___

Joseph Zernik, PhD

Human Rights Alert (NGO)